bmGlyph - bitmap font generator

A bitmap font generator for OSX is now available on the mac app store.

It has realtime rendering, a preview mode and many features: cast shadow, stroke, colors (plain, glossy), gradient and you can even import your own texture which will be applied on each glyph. It is also possible to work on each glyph without affecting the others (for example, having different colors for numbers etc...). The texture is resized automatically according to the settings, and an AutoSD option is available, which allow you to easily create bitmap fonts for retina display.

it generates a bitmap texture and an atlas file which can be used with any frameworks (cocos2d, corona, sparrow, unity, ... ).

there is currently no comparaison table between the 2 apps. but i tried to add new features such as the possibility to map a texture, work on each glyph individually, having an auto SD option, a full charset list ...

here is 3 promocodes for the iDevGames community:
XW4H7T767NFF
AHMJ4PFNHXYR
37MP3EWNMTLA
please reply with the code you took ...

Really pleased with it. I'm not familiar with glyph designer. I had been using Hiero for the last few years. I willl post a 5 star review for it

It's got a very nice feature set, good rendering, nice gradients. (only two color gradients, where glyph designer seems to have multiple, but I don't really care about that).

It's also worth noting that the "cocos2d" font format actually appears to be BMFont, which means it works in a lot of other things, such as the Slick library or any AngelCode font stuff. (So I can make prettier fonts for Reclaimed and Leader of Mans now)

Character Set: clicking a button should replace what's in there. If I repeatedly click Basic Latin, it'll keep sticking it into that box. I don't know. seems kinda weird. The rendering seems correct in that it doesn't keep adding repeated characters.

Wasn't able to select-all delete in the character box, but I'm guessing that's what "Reset" (looks like a refresh button) is for

Kerning: Whoo boy this could use some work. I basically recreated the same font for my titles from glyph designer in bmglyph, and I get some pretty radically different results (at least in Preview)
here's my chat font:

It looks like there is almost 0 kerning at all. Typography nightmare.

That being said, you support textured characters (which is something glyph designer does not). That being said, I don't have a need (yet?) for that. I do need properly kerned text =)

Yeah, bmGlyph is not outputting a set of kerning pairs. Heiro and (according to my IRC discussion with skyhawk) Glyph Designer both output kerning pairs. I never really used them, but in the case of Edwardian Script (as seen above), it's a bigger deal.

That being said, that probably isn't a huge addition, and it's good to see more apps out there.

(I forgot to mention in my last post.. I would also suggest mentioning that the Cocos2d format is also BMFont.. either as a separate item or just "Cocos2d/BMFont" in the export dropdown list)

Actually you can adjust yourself the 'xAdvance' offset in the preview mode. adding stroke or shadow is increasing each char bounding box, so the spacing is increasing too. i choose not to modify it automatically and let the user do it himself, depending on his needs (if you need a 20px stroke for example)

The kerning should also work and is written in the atlas file, try to use for example Arial, and letters in the preview mode 'AVATe', you can check/uncheck the kerning option and see the difference.

cocos2d/bmfont: yes you're right, i'll add that for the next update.

for the charsets: clicking 'add' will add the selected charset in the settings. clicking N times will add it N times... maybe it needs a little more work to make it more understandable.

the xAdvance is something which will be applied directly in the altas file, so when you adjust it on screen, you will see exactly the same in your game... that way you can have more or less spacing.
by default, i choose to increase the spacing if you increase the default width (for exemple when adding stroke or shadow, which is something you don't have with normal font). i guess that in glyphdesigner they chose to keep the intitial advancement. i prefered to let the user choose how he wants it to be

* kerning is still off for several fonts (but better than previous update)
* still can't select all, copy, or paste in the font selector
* Perhaps open your help inside an HTMLView inside your application instead of launching my web browser =)

V1.7 is now available and i added a feature (asked by a lot of people): multiple colors in gradients. Also a lot of work has been done on the engine, and bmGlyph is now much more faster when using 1000 of 2000 glyphs in the same project. Other work has been done on the font selector (now the available styles are correctly displayed) and some bugs & fixes.